Month: December 2012

Radio 4 broadcast a great mini lecture by Tom Armitage (to the RSA on the 26th of December) on the importance of understanding technology, specifically through coding, in order to ‘think’ in a way that’s easy to implement on machines. The premise being that we live in a ‘computer assisted’ world and being able to use them correctly can significantly help you, with work and leisure.

He ends with a reminder that it’s not just for children talking about New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who joined CodeAcademy in 2012 to learn how to code BBC article here

Designer and technologist Tom Armitage argues that learning to write computer code means learning to think in a modern way, and that it should spur creativity: the possibility of doing entirely new things.

Four Thought is a series of talks which combine thought provoking ideas and engaging storytelling. Recorded live in front of an audience, speakers air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.

Found a great quote from the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who recently became Head of Engineering at Google.

“The only second language you should worry about your kids learning is programming.”

I can’t agree with this strongly enough. Programming isn’t a skill that is best off being the sole preserve of a profession, like Law or Electrical Engineering for example. It’s obviously useful to understand the basics of those subject areas but knowledge of them is unlikely to help you do your job better (unless you’re a lawyer or electrician)

Programming is different. It’s a way to articulate your thinking via the manipulation of a computer and the computer is, beside our brain, the most powerful tool we have at our disposal. Thus far, the computer is the most effective tool we have to articulate our thoughts. It’s literally a dream machine. In a world increasingly made up of, and thus informed by, digital information this is how you articulate yourself. You have to be able to use a computer effectively and this is why:

As time passes your ability to instruct a computer to carry out your tasks, solidify your thoughts, will directly affect you and your families standard of living.

Here’s an example of that. I worked with a great marketing guy in team that developed a web product. Each month he needed to carry out some analytics of the product’s engagement. Unfortunately, he couldn’t write any code or scripts and this meant he couldn’t do his job now without having to rely on a ‘techy’ to run some reports. All he really needed was some basic SQL but he resisted it and working with software, as we all do increasingly, this gradually left him feeling a bit useless and he eventually quit his job. A loss to both the company, as he was a naturally gifted marketeer, and to him in terms of income and ultimately how he viewed his abilities. In literacy terms, he was unable to articulate himself and a feeling of frustration set in. As most business now rely on databases and most databases are relational, I suspect we will could SQL being a pre-requisite for more and more office jobs, especially those whose role is to produce reports.

Humans are tool makers and users. That is what shaped our development. Computers are the most important and significant tool that we’ve created. Like all good tools computers allow us to do things quicker and more easily but they then go far beyond this. So far beyond this, they have literally taken us to the stars.

With computers we can model the Universe, we can manipulate matter, simply put: if you can think it, with a computer you can create it. They allow us to make concrete the invisible and intangible stuff of dreams.

Found a great article which takes the same approach that I’m using which is to create a simple language for children to use, here’s the intro and a link

Learning how to program is going to be the most useful new skill we can teach our kids today. More than ever our lives depend on how smart we are when we instruct computers. They hold our personal data and they make decisions for us. They communicate for us and they are gradually becoming an extension of our brains. If we don’t learn programming as part of our childhood, we will never evolve. As the famous futurist, Ray Kurzweil, put it “The only second language you should worry about your kids learning is programming.”

After reading the Times article about the amazing work at St. Teresa’s and Merton Park, I dropped them an email to find out how they got started and they’ve kindly let me share it here (many thanks to Nicola Schofield and Anna McGrath who are the ones forging ahead with the teaching!)

Aside from the brilliant way they are both rolling up their sleeves and showing us the way, what’s incredible is hearing that 4-5 year olds are able to write simple programs and 6-7 year olds are suggesting loops to encapsulate repeated instructions.

We used Scratch – http://scratch.mit.edu/, which is a free download from MIT in Boston and can be installed on all school PC’s and by children at home. It works on Windows and Apple, but because it’s Flash-based it won’t work on ipads. Its fabulous – the children find it totally engaging and it appeals to all KS2 (and often younger), boys and girls etc. There are loads of help videos and video resources on the site. There is also a linked educational site http://scratched.media.mit.edu/, and from here we downloaded the Scratch Draft Curriculum http://scratched.media.mit.edu/resources/scratch-curriculum-guide-draft, which has lesson plans and resources all ready made. We used the intro lesson, the maze lesson and the Debug lesson (which the children really enjoyed). We let the children make whatever they wanted at first – but it had to have a London theme, as that was our topic last term – most chose the Jubilee or the Olympics.

Code Club http://www.codeclub.org.uk/ is another free resource. They launched last summer especially for volunteers teaching in schools. It’s for years 5 and 6. If you register as a volunteer, with a CRB number, you get access to a different, graded project in Scratch for each week. We photocopied for each child and left a laminated copy of each one lying around for anyone to try. They’re really good and I highly recommend them.

Children seem to pick up Scratch so quickly, they constantly amaze us and are way ahead of us but it doesn’t seem to matter. We just challenge them and are very clear we don’t know more than them. The other things we did prior to Scratch were:

ask the children to show hands if they think computers are clever. Then tell them that computers aren’t clever – it’s the people that programme them who are clever.

Discuss this process of giving instructions and saying “Go” – instruct the children similarly
showing the children some Youtube videos of programmed objects eg Robot of the Year, Robot lawnmowers and hoovers, dishwashers etc, with lots of chat about how they might work

programming each other (blindfolded) to walk in a square – discuss what’s difficult

screen turtles, eg 2Simple, iBoard, Logo and several online ones. Most were school software but you can find some online. We progressed from v simple ones in Reception to more complicated as they got older.

But, amazingly, Reception started writing small programmes and year 1 suggested looping eg to make squares – they noticed the repetition of instructions. Honestly, we have been flabbergasted by how young they pick it up.

Raph Koster (San Diego, CA) is the Chief Creative Officer for Sony Online Entertainment and author of the bestselling book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. For many years he has served as a lead designer for teams building online virtual worlds. His first job was as a designer working on persistent worlds at Origin Systems. His last project there was working on Ultima Online, opening the online persistent world market to the general gaming public

This is a set of slides that support his book,Theory of Fun for Game Design, which I’ve just bought and will write a mini-review once I’ve finished 😉

Seymour Papert opens his Mindstorms book with a foreward on how, aged two, his love of vehicles shaped the way he learned. Specifically he uses the example of gears and their differentials to show that this radically affected the way he interpreted the structure of maths, i.e. in terms of how his mind literally saw gears when he was presented with a maths problem, such as learning the times table and algebra. He believes computers can act as ‘gears’ for our children.

This was a bit of a light bulb moment for me, as someone that’s been immersed in programming (and that pretty much means recursion, iteration and boolean logic) for the last 20 years, as I tend to view almost all problems I’m presented with as iterative, they can be decomposed and solved with functions with ever increasing accuracy and conditional logic. I know, that description is not as elegant as the image of a gear but bear with me!

The light bulb bit was I know everyone is like this to some degree and a better understanding of computers and their logic could make us better problem solvers.

A good example would be if you asked me to divide two numbers in my head, I’d give you a pretty quick and deliberately approximate answer because of the following things working with computers and solving probles by writing software have taught my brain.

1. Scoping: Determine up front if precision or speed is required of the problem because…

2. Iteration: Often an approximate answer is good enough and rather than waste time, pass back the approximation ask if more precision is required and give an idea of how much time is needed.

The question I have now is did this logical approach exist before and is what pulled me toward computing or vice versa? Think I’ll call my parents…

I’ve just read the new sample GCSE paper which has been revamped following the recommendations from the Royal Society and the Computing at School Working Group about computing education in the United Kingdom.

Solving Problems Using Computers (30%) – 2 hour external assessment to assess the practical application of knowledge and understanding through a series of on-screen tasks.

Developing Computing Solutions (25%) – externally assessed and externally moderated 15 hour controlled assessment to develop a piece of work using programming software following a task brief issued by WJEC. There will be a choice of two task briefs.

For me, this represents a sea change in the direction of the academic subject at this level and is very strong statement of intent by the WJEC on how seriously they view the subject’s implications for helping our children develop and seek careers.

John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University and what I loved about the article, aside from his obvious love for wanting to share and impart knowledge, was the following suggestions for what we should start teaching.

That’s a pretty tasty and hefty list and I can immediately see that some of the topics will require a minimum age group e.g. Computational biology, Heuristics and I suspect that I’d argue that these are subjects that could be considered “Further learning”.

If we’re going to radically overhaul the way computing is taught we need to get the balance right and not put anyone off the subject and that’s a really important part of this exercise.

There are many comments on the online Observer piece that articulate just that concern but this will be a work in progress and all things considered I think we have to dive in and see how the children respond.

In my short, experience as a father, one thing I know for sure is that you should never under estimate a child’s ability to learn something new quickly – quicker than probably you or I would! No-one likes being condescend to so let’s start this project by not doing that 🙂